Is the marketing department the core of a marketing agency, a random type of business, or a tech company?
Most companies vary a lot – but I’ll try to outline my experience in each case.
Marketing Agencies
I’ve worked with hundreds of marketing agencies over the years. The smaller ones (< 20 people) generally profile in various forms of marketing and employ 2–3 tech folks dealing with everything on the tech side.
This could range from configuring platforms through helping with tech support at the office to building WordPress websites (or anything else on top of an existing company framework/CMS).
That’s not necessarily bad – but the volume of actual development may vary.
Some marketing companies invest heavily in development despite not being a tech company. A full-stack dev role in a marketing department may be closely related to website development combined with integrating different platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot and seamlessly connecting their features into an existing platform. It could be a good starting point.
Regular Businesses
A regular, non-tech or marketing business, may have less to offer in terms of guidance, direction, mentorship. It still depends on the core focus of the business and the size of the tech team.
I’ve worked in a similar organization once and it was related to jumping between activities all the time. From site administration to fixing minor bugs in existing sites to programming new components for a random project.
I’d ask for clarification regarding the existing team and the day-to-day activities.
Tech Companies
Tech companies still nurture their marketing departments.
The marketing team could be completely separated from the rest of the company. In that case you may be assigned to a marketing director or a marketing project manager who needs support with their campaigns.
For instance, we do provide marketing services for clients and for our own company. One of our developers is dedicated to the marketing department while a couple marketers are supporting our business goals. It’s a handy mix and developers may jump between projects at different phases of their career.
In that case, it could be a transition (a learning curve) before jumping to a dedicated development role. Or it simply can be a role that is indeed supporting marketing needs – which can still include different site building and integration activities, including front-end development for landing pages or email templates and the like.
